Germans May Get Riled by Tarantino’s Bastards

Uh oh. You don’t want to get the Germans mad. When the Germans get mad, they … write bad things about you in their newspapers. That seems to be what happened when Tom Cruise came to town for his WWII movie “Valkyrie”, which apparently was so full of inaccuracies that German historians that saw it got into a tizzy about it. (Was it the fact that everyone in the movie talked in their own native accents? Or maybe it was when Tom Cruise outran a Nazi robot firing vaporizing rays?) Now the Germans are prepared to set their sights on Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglorious Bastards”.

What began as an Internet murmur here went mainstream with a recent article by Tobias Kneibe, film editor of the Suddeutsche Zeitung, who predicted the project could have an explosive effect similar to that of Tom Cruise’s “Valkyrie,” which has been savaged in the German media even though it won’t hit theaters until 2009.

“All the German historians and critics who were left gasping for breath by Tom Cruise and his worthy attempts will be so shocked by ‘Inglorious Bastards’ that they will savage it on the spot,” Kniebe wrote.

Even though he personally likes the script, Kneibe saidthat “the collision between Tarantino-style pop culture with the themes of the Holocaust and Jewish revenge (the ‘Bastards’ of the film are Jewish-American Nazi hunters) is unprecedented in Germany and its results are completely unpredictable.”

More potential fuel for the fire: Tarantino’s pulp fiction version of German history will almost certainly get German state financing. Germany’s DFFF film fund gives automatic tax breaks for local shoots and “Bastards” is set to shoot almost entirely in Studio Babelsberg outside Berlin.

“I don’t see how it should not be eligible for DFFF money,” said Kirsten Niehuus, director of the Berlin-Brandenburg regional film fund.

Wait a minute. I thought after World War II the Germans sort of lost all right to be offended by anything that concerns them and the war? You know, because of all those naughty things they did during said war? They were, back then, quite the bastards, indeed.

And besides, I’ve read Tarantino’s “Bastards” script, and if the Germans should be offended by anything, it’s Tarantino’s poor use of punctuations. Egads, man!